The Prayer of a Broken Heart: a review

Fr Paul Abernathy’s new book, The Prayer of a Broken Heart, is a splendidly multifaceted exploration—from a perspective rooted in the Orthodox Christian tradition—of the religious history and spiritual character of African slaves in America and their descendants. Speaking as a white American Orthodox Christian, I’m sure that what I got out of it would be very different than what a black American would get out of it. And I’m sure that a ‘cradle’ Orthodox Christian from within one of the traditionally-religious immigrant communities that came here after slavery had been abolished would get something else entirely out of it. However, the fact that The Prayer of a Broken Heart has something to say to each of these groups is a mark of its strengths. Although it is an adaptation of his seminary master’s thesis, precisely as a work of religious history it stands firmly on its own merits.

The Prayer of a Broken Heart may be said to have three strands. The first strand is an apologia of African-American Christianity as an, if not the, authentic and valid expression of African-American culture (as opposed to being a ‘white man’s religion’ or a ‘slaveowner creed’ foisted upon the slaves by their masters). The second strand is a portrait of African-American spirituality as it was formed through and the experiences of slavery, race-based terrorism, segregation and informal discrimination. And the third strand is an exploration of the commonalities between the African-American religious experience and the historical witness of the Orthodox Church. Interspersed through all of these strands are the accounts of pastoral experiences Fr Paul himself has had, working as a priest in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The men and women whom he encounters have lives shaped by profound grief and loss. But that same suffering leads them, just as it has led many generations of their ancestors, before the Cross.

The historical aspect of the book is logically presented and carefully argued from primary source materials—slave narratives in particular. Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Charles Ball, Josiah Henson, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown and others are given space to speak in their own words from their own experiences. If Fr Paul’s authorial voice is somewhat more distant in these passages, that is all to his credit, as these narratives have their own power. The picture he draws out of these narratives is one which complicates and deflates both triumphalist-panglossian white accounts of slavery as a ‘civilising mission’, and anti-Christian tendencies in black-nationalist thought that portray Christianity as a ‘white man’s religion’. It becomes quite clear in these accounts that slave-owners had no interest whatsoever in edifying their slaves or leading them to Christianity. Their sole interest in their slaves was as productive property. In fact: slave-owners feared slaves’ expressions of religiosity, as the prayers of slaves were a powerful implicit witness to their spiritual equality before God.

Slave-owners were known to hold dances and parties with music and secular entertainments for their slaves to keep them ‘happy’. But religious gatherings were feared and forbidden. It was common for slave-owners to have slaves beaten cruelly or even killed for praying. Slaves would therefore organise prayer meetings in ‘hush harbours’: backwoods or basement locations hidden from the eyes of masters and overseers. For two hundred years, African-American Christianity was by necessity an ‘invisible institution’—a phrase borrowed from the religious historian Albert J Raboteau, whom Fr Paul Abernathy quotes at length. The message that he draws from this is clear: African-American Christianity, far from being received by slaves from masters, was attained and held in spite of the suppression of Christianity by their masters. Fr Paul tells us outright that the first records we have of slaves converting in any significant number to Christianity occurred during the first Great Awakening, when ‘New Light’ itinerant preachers would draw mixed-race crowds to revival meetings… often over the strenuous objections of the supine ‘Old Light’ pastors who were the representatives of the slave-owners’ religion.

This leads Fr Paul to open a descriptive account of the character of the Christianity of black America. Because it was an ‘invisible institution’—a church of the catacombs, shaped by the ever-present reality of persecution—it quickly became characterised by a radical trust in the will of God; an extended hope of justice however long deferred; a reliance upon the power of prayer; deference to the witness of elders who had experienced God’s action in their own lives; and an emphasis on salvific suffering and the openness of a ‘broken heart’ to God.

This provides an opening for Fr Paul Abernathy to explore the parallels between the African-American religious experience and Orthodox theology. To a certain extent, he counts on the Orthodox Christian section of his audience to have a great enough familiarity with the rudiments of hesychasm and the words of Psalm 50 to make certain connexions on their own. But he deftly illustrates how the sublative, broken-hearted and penitential character of African-American Christianity shares fundamental similarities with Orthodoxy—drawing upon numerous Patristic writings from Saint Isaac of Nineveh through Saint Gregory Palamas to Saints Silouan of Athos and Sophrony of Essex for demonstration.

Here Fr Paul Abernathy has a much clearer and direct case to make for a connexion than does, say, Hieromonk Damascene Christensen in Christ the Eternal Tao. Fr Paul has enough respect for the tradition he examines to acknowledge the clear differences between it and the Orthodox tradition. At the same time, though, he makes an honest appeal for the Orthodox ‘case’ with African-Americans. He notices in the remnants of African religion which were carried over into Christianity still more similarities with Orthodoxy: communality, the person as a web of relationships, the closeness of the human world to the Divine. And he notes in the tradition of African-American Christianity certain unmet needs and expectations in itself, most notably: a desire for self-denial, for discipline (explaining the appeal of the Nation of Islam), for mystical communion with God. And he argues that the Orthodox Church is capable of meeting these needs and expectations, as Protestant churches are quickly finding themselves deficient of these things.

Ultimately, though, this book is a labour of love. I use that term advisedly. Fr Paul Abernathy is not a nationalist of any sort: indeed, he considers pride (including national pride) to be the very source of many of the ills which the love of Christ must heal. For him, the most salient and salvific features of African-American Christianity are its insistence on forgiveness and on love of enemies: both insistences which are shared by the best aspects of Orthodox Christianity. And it is clear that he himself speaks from a position of love, even when he issues criticism.

His analysis is not without its critical dimension. Although he has nothing but words of praise for the musical tradition of the black spiritual (that true cry from the bottom of a broken heart, expressed in a cappella harmony!), he waxes particularly critical of modern African-American culture when it comes to popular music and consumption habits. He considers much of modern black musical and popular culture to be a form of propaganda which weakens the spirit—in much the same way as the secular dances and parties held by the slave-owners kept their slaves docile. I was rather surprised and a bit dismayed to read the harsh words he had even for blues and rock-‘n’-roll music, both of which (instrument-driven, individualistic, disillusioned and worldly) he views as a qualitative falling-away from the otherworldly hope and communal fellow-suffering epitomised by the spirituals.

Many thanks to Fr Paul Abernathy for publishing this work in a form which makes it available to a broad audience outside the academy. The Prayer of a Broken Heart is very much worth the time taken to read. For American Orthodox Christians in particular (and anyone interested in the history of American religion and constructive modern approaches to race relations generally), it is an excellent source to ingest, to ponder, and to begin conversations from.

Does God take sides?

Sometimes one hears it said in American theopolitical discourse, that God does not take sides in politics. There is one sense in which this is a true and worthy impulse to say. And there is another sense in which this glib characterisation becomes dangerously wrong.

Firstly, I tend to believe that it is fully right and accurate to hold that the God of the Holy Scriptures, the Creator of the cosmos, has little to choose in terms of American politics. I believe it is proper to say that God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

The first reason that such a characterisation is true, is because the agendas of both parties take moral positions which would be thoroughly and irreconcilably repugnant to the early Church. The first-century Apostolic text called the Didachē, to take one example, explicitly condemns the practice of abortion. This practice is, sadly, ‘unequivocally’ countenanced as a ‘reproductive right’ by the official platform of the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party is no better than the Democratic Party—indeed, in one fundamental way it is worse. The Didachē condemns idolatry as thoroughly as, and in fact more often than, it condemns abortion. And the Republican Party upholds, from the very first sentence of the preamble of its own platform, an explicit form of idolatry: the idolatry which exalts the nation-state as ‘exceptional’ and ‘unlike any other nation on earth’, and which exalts the US Constitution as a sacred ‘covenant’. What does God have to choose between one party for which destroying innocent children is a sacred right, and another party which proclaims aloud with the priests of the Sanhedrin that they have ‘no king but Cæsar’?

Although for a long time I have personally refused to support either major party with my vote, I say this not to cast aspersions on the ordinary American Christians who decide to vote with one major party or the other. Most people have independent reasons, driven by pragmatism or by personal and contextual considerations, for preferring, even strongly preferring, one party over the other. I assuredly do not believe that having such reasons makes one evil or an enemy of God. I say this merely to demonstrate that the God Who created the whole of the cosmos, Who revealed Himself by the law and the prophets to ancient Israel, and Who Himself took human flesh from a certain virgin in first-century Galilee, has nowhere to lay His head when it comes to the halls of power in Washington.

But does this mean that God does not take sides in politics, full stop?

First-order, it strikes me as rather presumptuous for American Christians to assume, that simply because the two main Coke-and-Pepsi options in their own particular powerful nation-state are both distant from God, that God must be equally distant from all possible forms of political expression. Yet many high-minded and well-intentioned evangelicals, Catholics, even Orthodox Christians, make an explicit and public point that ‘God is not political’ and that it is the job of Christians to ‘rise above politics’.

However well-intentioned this apolitical impulse may be in its attempt to engender benefit of the doubt between neighbours on opposing sides of the political divide, it nevertheless confuses a particular point. Politics is, at its basis, merely the art of learning to live together with one’s neighbour. The call to love one’s neighbour is a fundamentally political statement, and even the strictest hermits and most cloistered monks in Christian history were enjoined by their vows to uphold this particular substance in their politics. But then comes the question of the scholar of the law to Christ: ‘Who, then, is my neighbour?’

Christ answers this in the immediate sense with the parable of the Good Samaritan. However, He also more generally answers the question of this scholar of the law in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. If nothing else, the Beatitudes tell us, in their apportioning of blessing, the political position of God. In short: God does take sides. God takes the side of the poor; of those who sorrow; of the meek; of those who hunger and thirst for justice; of the merciful; of the innocent; of the peacemakers; of the persecuted.

Worth noting is that these categories are not merely symbolic or transcendental. The Beatitudes are not a parable—in fact, they are one of the few places in the Greek Scriptures where Jesus is not speaking in a way that points primarily to the symbolic. The Beatitudes are specific, direct and concrete. And they have immediate ramifications to present-day political situations.

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Iraqi people who still suffer from poverty, infant deformity and internal displacement—or would He be found on the side of their invaders and occupiers?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Yemeni people, overwhelmingly children, who still suffer from the attacks of bombs and rockets and the threat of starvation—or would He be found on the side of the Croesuses of Saudi who launch those bombs and rockets and blockade Yemen’s ports?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Syrian people who still suffer from the effects of war, invasion, religious persecution, starvation, sanctions—or would He be found on the side of the Turkish, Saudi, Qatari, Emirati, Uighur and other CIA-funded Wahhâbi religious extremists who invaded and murdered them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Palestinian people whose livelihoods are destroyed, who are evicted from their homes, and who are shot dead and detained on the streets of their own cities and villages—or would He be found on the side of the settlers and military who do the destroying, evicting, shooting and detaining?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Haitian people who are protesting in the streets against the dysfunction of their state and the theft of their country’s wealth—or on the side of those who would send in tanks and planes to oppress them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the ordinary people in Donbass who have suffered from nearly nine years of non-stop shelling and from deliberately-engineereed lack of access to schools and hospitals—or would He side with the race-nationalist paramilitaries, SBU, AFU and NATO forces who are doing the shelling?

Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Venezuelan people—or on the side of the foreign operatives and mercenaries who tried to overthrow their elected government? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Bolivian people—or on the side of the lithium mining consortiums which foisted a coup on them? Would Jesus be found on the side of Indigenous water and land defenders—or on the side of huge multinational energy conglomerates who use police forces and National Guard to harass and repress them? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Africans—or on the side of the French and British and American governments who continue to siphon off Africa’s wealth? Would Jesus be found on the side of innocent children—or on the side of those who traffic and exploit their bodies, or kill them in the womb?

In my own humble opinion, even to pose these questions in the light of the Beatitudes, is to answer them. Unfortunately, in each of these cases, the considerations and interests of worldly power—sometimes soft-pedalled into the conversation under the guise of soi-disant ‘democracy’, ‘rule of law’, ‘nuance’, ‘impartiality’, ‘objectivity’—serve to cloud and muddy the consciences of those who would otherwise clearly answer in each of these instances. But if Jesus does promise the blessings He did in the Beatitudes, then we must say that He would take the side of the Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians, Haitians, New Russians, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Indigenous nations, African nations, children—over their oppressors and persecutors. Jesus Himself took just such a political side when He chose to be crucified by the Roman authorities in conjunction with the Sanhedrin and their Herodian puppets… between two bandits. They discredited Him and crucified Him as a political agent, as a would-be ‘King of the Jews’.

Those of us who live in an empire with pretensions of universality, a latter-day Rome, where the primary political choices are between infanticidaires on one side and open idolaters on the other, have a responsibility to choose a radical third option, and to side with those throughout the world who suffer at the hands of Cæsar. And we must do so even at the risk of being called ‘communists’, ‘tankies’, ‘campists’ and worse. To do otherwise would be to betray the Gospel, and the Beatitudes in particular which place God on the side of those who suffer, rather than those who of design and intent inflict suffering.

Thick as a BRICS?

Interesting news recently out of Moscow: evidently the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are attempting to build a shared infrastructure for ease of payments that may end up including a new reserve currency as a rival to the dollar. This move comes as a response to Western financial sanctions on Russia which froze its foreign reserves in response to the escalation of the Ukrainian war.

It became clear very soon after this war heated up that the global financial system was even less of a level playing field than it originally appeared. As such, the BRICS nations all seem to be interested in finding ways to reduce reliance on Western institutions that enforce financial and economic dominance, such as the IMF. As a leftist, the only thing I can say is this: more power to them. To say that such a strong challenge to the financial hegemony of the Washington-London-Tôkyô Triad is welcome would be a strong understatement. And there are several aspects to this new reserve currency that sound particularly intriguing.

The first is that it would be based on a basket of the five BRICS nations’ currencies: the ruble, the renminbi, the rand, the rupee and the real. This seems like an interesting ‘middle way’ that avoids the pitfalls of the euro. Allowing each of the member nations to retain control over its own monetary (and thus also trade) policies in ways which the Eurozone didn’t seems a good way to avoid internal friction between the member countries.

Also, the money not being tied to a commodity (like gold) helps keep the supply flexible and reduces the possible exploitation of agricultural communities. America’s experiment in gold-backed reserve currency turned out to be a disaster for the working poor in this country, and it seems like the BRICS countries are not eager to repeat that mistake. However, this structure does seem to come with its own risks. It would be interesting to see how the banking-oversight mechanism for this currency would work.

The other big news this week is that Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in the US. This is also welcome news to me, and I make no bones about it. The Mississippi law upheld in the court’s decision actually seems to be a fairly moderate law which places the same restrictions on abortion access after the first trimester that most modern Western European countries have. However, I have some strong reservations about the long-term results of the overturn.

First and foremost, we simply don’t have the same supports for new and expecting mothers that Western Europe does. Placing restrictions on abortion parallel to those that exist in, say, France and the UK, without enacting the parallel social safety net provisions, is going to have a wantonly and cruelly punitive effect on childbearing women. The Democrats (using the excuse provided them by Manchin and Synema) completely punted on the Build Back Better Act, which would have included provisions for an expanded child tax credit, paid family leave, medical care subsidies, universal pre-K, new affordable housing and school lunches: all of which would have directly benefitted new mothers. And of course not one single Republican supported the BBBA, which shows effectively that they’re not and never have been the pro-life party that they claim to be.

Second, the overturn hands the decision over whether (and how) to restrict abortion access entirely over to the individual states. We’ve seen this movie play out before under different circumstances. It didn’t end well. It’s very likely that we will start seeing nullification arguments and secession movements begin to take shape in the near future as the divides grow sharper. I have seen multiple pro-life women in my social media network refer to the Roe overturn as a ‘Pyrrhic victory’. I think they happen to be right about that.

However, one thing that the Roe overturn is going to clarify, and quickly, is the degree to which Americans who claim to care about human life actually do. I fully expect the vast majority of so-called ‘pro-life’ Republicans will continue to sit on their hams and oppose any sort of humane legislation that would make life for new mothers and children more possible and bearable, and I would unfortunately say the same about so-called ‘pro-life’ Democrats in the mould of Joe Manchin. The Solidarists are probably going to continue to mealy-mouth their way into conversations about how we should create pie-in-the-sky ‘decentralised’ legislative solutions which stand no chance of garnering popular support anywhere and which wouldn’t work even if they were passed. The necessity of socialist fixes to the American economy, I expect, will become a lot clearer to a lot more people in the coming months, and I hope that these fixes can attract the support of at least a handful of pro-life types who are uncomfortable with the cognitive dissonance their Republican allegiance has hitherto imposed on them.

A growing Third World consensus position

Here’s an interesting map and dataset from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Now, the accompanying commentary is, of course, bourgeois nonsense (as to be expected from a neoliberal rag like The Economist)… however, the data itself are interesting for several reasons.

The great bulk of the world’s population have not, in contrast to what many in the Western media would tell you, chosen a side in this conflict. Most nations of the global south have either staked out a carefully neutral position through their diplomatic and economic policies, or else they tend to lean mildly in one direction or the other (with Asian and African countries generally leaning in Russia’s direction, and Latin American countries generally leaning in the West’s direction—though there are obviously notable exceptions in all cases).

If there are any commonalities in what one sees coming out of the global south in response to Russia’s assault on the Ukraine, then they are these. Global south countries are willing to condemn the assault itself, but are highly unwilling to back the West’s New Cold War hybrid-war strategy (including economic sanctions, freezing out of international agreements, and weapons sales / shipments) against Russia. The data show a fairly significant cleft between the Washington-Tokyo-London ‘triad’ (now joined unconditionally by Brussels, sadly) and the rest of the world at large. And they show nowhere near as clearly as in the EIU’s own breakdown of support for Russia by population vs by GDP. Countries with low financial clout are overrepresented among Russia’s supporters; while countries with high financial clout are overrepresented among Russia’s enemies.

Whether they take this position for economic reasons, reasons of political expediency, ideological alignment or security interests is a matter of debate, of course. And in most cases, this debate ends up being a façade for some rather patronising views of the global south generally. That is to say, Western observers tend to attribute resistance to the Western agenda in the global south to base mercenary motives, corruption or ‘authoritarianism’—while they attribute acquiescence to the same to good-faith democracy-and-human-rights idealism. But the data are what they are.

Not to toot my own horn too loudly on this, but this shows a tendency I’ve been talking about right along on my blog. Even here, though, I’ve been taking my queues somewhat from Dcn Steve Hayes over at his blog, Khanya. The fact that certain of my readers are only just now upset with me, whether for pointing this out or for agreeing with the global south over the new Western bloc, shows that they never have read me very carefully. Ah well, que sera.

It used to be the case that four primates of the Local Churches were devoted to finding a just ecclesiastical solution to Orthodoxy’s geopolitical woes between Moscow and Constantinople. That was before the primates of both Cyprus and Alexandria decided to break fellowship with and betray the Third World by decisively throwing in their lot with the US/NATO bloc. The primates of the Third World had been, in fact, Orthodoxy’s best hope for restoring a just ecclesiastical peace—which might very well have averted a shooting war. Jerusalem and Antioch—both of which have been and continue to be the sites of religiously-motivated violence and discrimination against Christians—may yet manage to be an instrument of God’s justice and of God’s peace in Eastern Europe.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of when a radical Jewish teacher from the backwater Syrian province of Galilee (al-Jalîl), from a humble background in carpentry, was put to death in Jerusalem for opposing the greatest empire in the world of that time, along with that empire’s religious toadies. This is a Jewish teacher Who was venerated by Rome’s official enemies, magi from Parthia, as well as by a Roman centurion; by local collaborators (tax collectors) of this empire, and by local resisters (zealots). In the end, He was crucified between two of these latter. He was betrayed by one of his own disciples. His own step-brothers did not believe in Him. His most trusted disciple denied Him three times. All of the (male) disciples but one fled from danger at His arrest.

This week of all weeks, we should not look for truth to the great centre of financial and military imperial power, to the latter-day Cæsar among his marble monuments and idols on the Washington Mall. Nor should we necessarily look for truth to the rival power, to the latter-day Parthian Shâh in the Kremlin. Adherents of truth may be found in either place, and it is probably easier to find them in the rival power, but those with power will not be likely to be among them. We should not look to the disciples who all fought each other to be at His right hand, yet at the Crucifixion had all deserted their teacher and were nowhere to be found. There is no doubt in my mind that Patriarch Bartholomew (with all of his strivings to claim for himself the honour of ‘first without equals’) is one such disciple… and the jury’s out on whether or not Patriarch Kirill will ultimately be found to be such. We shall see.

Instead, we must look to where the Theotokos stood, to where the disciple John stood, to where Saint Dismas was crucified by the Lord’s side. Look to where the forgotten and crucified peoples of the world are: the Christians and Alawites and other religious minorities of Syria, the Yemenis, the Congolese, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Kashmiris, the Palestinians, the refugees and civilians of Donbass. Christ will be among them.

What comes afterward? redux: post-liberalisms rising

Given the somewhat worried tone of my non-hagiographical blog posts of late (like ‘Hindsight and foresight’, ‘Ideological history’, ‘Solovyov and the problem of the post-sæcular’), I felt it might be wise to spend some time speaking a bit more dispassionately and analytically about what I’m observing at this point in world news.

I don’t think that the news on that end is all bad; not a bit of it. I am merely asserting that those of us in the West who are sceptical of the legacy of liberalism need to tread carefully because we are setting out onto uncharted territory. It is very difficult for any of us to reference or chart a future without the complex of liberalism-slash-nominalism-slash-capitalism-slash-technocracy hanging over us. We have – and I very much include myself here – a tendency to look to winged visions of prisca theologica and other past manifestations of præ-liberal order in our attempts to envision what a post-liberal order will look like. But what is happening on the global scale, as history keeps proving itself to be very far from a Fukuyama-style end, is both terrifying and exhilarating. Instead of one post- or alter-liberalism popping up to assert itself, we have a whole plethora of them, and some of them are very clearly preferable to the others.

What I’m going to try to do here is to organise them in a systemic way, such that they can be placed in perspective with each other. The ‘liberal international order’ centred in Washington and New York which finds itself still in power but with ever-dwindling reserves of moral or theoretical legitimacy, is also playing favourites. That needs to be very carefully borne in mind. That said, the global backlash against liberalism, the Washington Consensus, neoliberal technocracy and austerity politics has afforded us a moment of fertile experimentation in terms of political organisation. It’s worth taking account of where all these options are coming from, what is prompting their rise, and where they are likely to go.

1. Illiberal democratic socialism. This ‘option’ is the one I’ve been talking up for a long while now. It combines the œconomic priorities of democratic socialism (including public ownership, public infrastructure, state-mediated wage bargaining, strong welfare-state initiatives) with a strong Tory paternalist streak in social policy. Illiberal democratic socialists tend to be pro-natalist, pro-family, civic-communitarian, immigration-sceptical (but not racialist), classical in their architectural tastes. They also have a penchant for the preservation of wilderness and wildlife. Their star is currently ascendant in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Moldova and Slovakia), and has echoes in the ‘Russkiy Mir’ politics of the Baltic states.
   
   One of the reasons I’m so bullish on the illiberal democratic socialism of Eastern Europe is because it so easily bears the peculiar Byzantine marks of Yugoslav and Czechoslovak politics that I’ve come to value so deeply. As such, they bear a kin resemblance – not at all accidental, in my own humble opinion – to the Tory socialisms of John Ruskin and William Morris which were so influential on me. At the very least, this illiberal democratic socialism may be a means for Yugoslavs and Eastern Europeans to assert a strong regional identity.





2. Civilisational realism. This is the option that is being put forward primarily by the state and the leading theorists of Russia. As articulated by Dr Boris Mezhuev, civilisational realism is not so much an ideology as it is a strategy of engagement and an attempt to mitigate the effects of the modern de facto multipolar world order. The civilisational realists are noticeably informed by the conservatism of Karamzin, Il’in and Berdyaev, and very much opposed to manifestations of liberal ideology. But they are nonetheless quite mild and quiet on the topic of ideological issues of any sort, whether œconomic or social. The civilisational realists are not crusaders; they bear neither the Western nor the Islâmic world any animus unless either attacks them. Likewise, they aren’t particularly voluble on domestic issues, apart from critiquing the culture of corruption that has accompanied Russian society since the years of Gorbachev and Eltsin. As I have mentioned before, the intimation of loss is a strong constant undercurrent in the creative thinking of the Rodina. Civilisational realism is an expression of the Russian nation’s desire to be given an autonomy and dignity she (rightly) feels she’s been denied for decades.
   
   At the same time, though, the civilisational realists are keenly attuned to the questions of particularity and historical contingency that were originally raised by Herder. This is, without a doubt, a legacy of the Slavophil impress on Russian conservatism. Likewise, the willingness to engage the West on positive terms is a deliberate echo of the Slavophil engagements of the early-to-mid nineteenth century. But civilisational realism tends in a very different direction than Slavophilia. It doesn’t bear the messianic marks of the original Slavophils. Its historical awareness has given its proponents a degree of humility that is lacking in the likes of Kireevsky, Khomyakov or Aksakov. They do not pretend to be giving to the world the unique ‘new word’ that Russia was supposed to speak; instead, they are trying to allow Russia time to catch its breath again.





3. Marxism. Far from being the dead or moribund ideology that our élites have been telling us it’s been for the past three decades, the Marxist parties of southern India, Nepal, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Venezuela, (until recently) Bolivia and (yes) China have shown themselves to be resilient, flexible, tough and pragmatic. Whether or not you agree with their outcomes or the means by which they keep power, they have shown themselves to be politically stable in the face of active attempts to bludgeon them into submission or oblivion with sanctions, interventions and colour revolutions.
   
   More than that: Marxism has proven to be surprisingly dynamic. I can attest from experience that actually-existing Marxist parties operate in an intellectual space heavily-dosed with inaccessible, inane, soporific jargon. At the same time, there is valuable intellectual work being done at the fringes of the ‘big red circle’. Marxism is creatively making contact with environmentalism; with religion; even with culturally-conservative traditionalism – and the results are, to say the least, interesting to watch. Marxism is likely to remain a significant alternative to liberalism for the foreseeable future throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia.





4. Red Shî‘ism; Black Shî‘ism. The title of Dr Ali Shariati’s article is an apt description of the politics – on both sides of the coin – of the Mihwar al-Muqâwamah. It represents, like the civilisational realism described above, a strategy rather than an ideology per se, and it is a strategy that is shared by both sæcular Arab nationalists and theocratic Persians. But it is an offensive rather than a defensive strategy; a strategy for pursuing asymmetric warfare rather than a strategy for détente.
   
   ‘Red’ Shî‘ism, informed as it is by the martyrdoms of ‘Alî and Husayn on behalf of the helpless and by the eschatological ideal of righteous kingship inherited from Zoroastrianism, takes a natural and instinctive solidarity with the oppressed and uses it as a revolutionary rallying-cry. The ‘red’ Shî‘ism of Hizbullâh which actively takes up the cause of the Christians in Lebanon, just as readily in the case of Ansârullâh takes up the cause of the starving and deprived Yemeni people. The idea of martyrdom on behalf of the defenceless in Shî‘a Islâm is strong enough that its passion extends to the welfare of non-Muslims.
   
   But as Dr Shariati notes, ‘red’ Shî‘ism – the religion of the martyrs – turns rapidly into the ‘black’ Shî‘ism of the Safavids – the religion of mourning. There is a certain note of cynicism that creeps in around the edges when Shî‘ism is exposed to the realities of power. Though Shariati is more emphatic on the nature of ‘red’ Shî‘ism and more apophatic on ‘the religion of mourning’, what he doesn’t say about the latter is eloquent. The ‘religion of mourning’ is one in which the fervour for the dignity of the oppressed cools and congeals into a set of theocratic dictums. The cleric takes himself into a masjid beside ‘Âlî Qâpû, his face long with resignation, and expounds with grim necessity the realities of power politics. This is not, I hasten to add, merely an Islâmic problem: we Orthodox Christians, too, have our problems with ‘mourning’ cynicism. But the words of the clerics in Tehran, however just their outward cause, are to be watched with care.





5. Nationalisme intégral. I have written before, at length, about how Christian democratic politics betrayed their radical roots in the 1950s and 1960s for a rapprochement with the bourgeois politics of ordoliberalism and austerity œconomics. It seems to be something of an irony that when you strip away this discredited layer of œconomic whiggery, what remains is not the humane radicalism of Mounier and Maritain, which has long since absconded, but instead something a good deal bleaker: a positivist, corporatist nationalism recalling that of Maurras.
   
   The crisis of social solidarity that the European Union suffered with the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 spurred a massive backlash, particularly in Eastern and Southern Europe. The result in places like Poland (with the election of Duda) and Hungary (with the election of Orbán) was a certain coarsening of the national fibre. Both the PiS and the Fidesz parties lay claim to the Christian democratic mantle, but both of them avidly play to a certain narrative which links the salvation of Christendom to the fate of the nation-state, and furthermore posits the integral party apparatus as the sole means of saving both. This too-close and instrumentalist conceptual linkage between a higher and more primal form of solidarity, and a lower and more contingent one, is actually quite dangerous, and there are good reasons to be wary of it.
   
   Christians first and foremost should be wary of this kind of integral nationalism. It is not taking root only in Western nations culturally rooted in Christendom. It is also growing roots in India with the BJP under Modi, which self-describes as ‘integral humanist’. And it is also growing roots in Turkey with the AKP under Erdoğan, whose integralist ideology is drawn straight from Qutb’s articulation of political Sunnî Islâm – a connexion which the ‘Little Sultan’ still values in his current policy. The more integralist Hungaries and Polands are cultivated in the West, the more open and vulnerable we leave our brothers in the East to their enemies in places like Turkey and India.





6. Fascism. Speaking of far-right nationalisms, here’s another one that’s come slithering up from the gutter of the twentieth century’s mechanised total wars of ideology. Never mind, of course, that fascism is rooted in transhuman futurism and avant-garde æsthetics. Never mind that the resurgent alt-right shares similarly haute-moderne and post-moderne roots. It is still going to pretend to be the alternative to liberal decadence that Europe (and Latin America) has been missing. And, unfortunately, it looks likely to gain more than a mere handful of followers.
   
   I want to be very clear that I am using the term ‘fascism’ in a very narrow and technical sense. Fascism is not merely a byword for just any far-right nationalism with corporatist characteristics. It is not the same thing as the nationalisme intégral that I mention above, though it is a kissing-cousin. Intégrisme has problems, but it stops well short of claiming to regiment and militarise all aspects of social and individual life. Even in this strongly-restrictive definition, though, fascism is present enough in places like the Ukraine, Brazil and now Bolivia to be dangerous and worthy of mention as one of the illiberal ideological forces rising in liberalism’s shadow.





7. Salafi jihâdism. This fundamentalist ideology has been a distinctive danger around the globe since well before the World Trade Centre attacks on the eleventh of September, 2001 – arguably it’s been so since the late 1980s in Afghanistan. Now the fanatical toxin is spreading from Nigeria to Bosnia to Xinjiang and the Philippines. In Nigeria, Christians are being persecuted as never before. The headloppers of Dâ‘iš and al-Qâ‘idah are unfortunately a ubiquitous presence from Libya to Iraq, with Syria having borne a great brunt of the terrorist damage in recent years.
   
   The Salafis may receive aid from the United States intelligence services. However, they think of themselves as the ‘purifiers’ of Islâm from all the modern dross that has accumulated around centuries of Islâmic cultural practice throughout the world. That includes anything in the visual arts or in literature that does not conform to a rigid standard of Muslim piety. They adhere in lockstep to the most stringent and literal of textual interpretations of the Qur’ân and hadith, and increasingly they believe that the only right way to rectify Islâm is by the creation of a state purely founded on Islâmic law, which is to be rigidly and ruthlessly enforced uniformly across the entire body of believers and subject peoples. They are the Islâmic equivalent of the equally-literalist fundamentalist evangelicals in the United States.

Now, it should be crystal clear to the gentle readers of this blog that I harbour some robust partizan preferences among these options. I am avowedly a very strong supporter of the syncretic paternalistic leftism that has arisen in Eastern Europe: the closest thing on offer we have to the High Toryism of Britain’s better days. I also have strong sympathies toward the ‘civilisational realism’ of Russia’s conservatives. I have long felt such realism to be a healthy counterweight to the foreign policy we conduct here, based as it is on outdated ideologies on autopilot and a morass of private interests anchored in the military-industrial complex.

I have also been known, on occasion, to comment positively on political Shî‘ism and on Chinese Marxism. However, my true loyalties lie with Mosaddegh and the National Front in Iran’s case; and with the Democratic League in China’s case – both socialist-leaning organisations with healthy respect for tradition.

So it should come as no surprise as I finish this analysis, that I am deeply invested in what form the post-liberal order in the world will take. I do not want to live in a world dominated by the picayune hatreds and petty spats of a gross-odd bickering nation-states, each headed by the most clownish of bourgeois buffoons their pandering mass-medias can conjure to the baying rabble. It is an insult to lions to have to be governed by such rats. Neither do I want to be governed by a dour, joyless puritanical religious élite who would snatch the Christmas eggnog out of my hands and expect to be thanked for the favour. At the same time, it’s clear to me that actually-existing liberalism, exhausted as it is in a moral and intellectual sense, can no longer pretend to offer to the world a set of coherent rules for the pursuit of the good. That task now falls to others. But which others: that is a question that matters deeply.

It strikes me that all of these options have a certain investment in questions of theopolitics. That is not a surprise. The Enlightenment project was by and large a separation of the political sphere from the questions of ultimate meaning, and the relegation of those questions of meaning to the purely private sphere and the realm of the conscience. It is therefore no surprise that the ideologies now jockeying to take the place of liberalism are attempting to reconnect questions of governance to questions of meaning in various ways. Once again I have to reiterate: I agree with the religious intégristes on the stakes involved here. I also agree with them on two of their three sentences. But there are clearly a number of different ways in which the temporal and the æternal ends of man can be configured, and we would do well not to choose one which seems too easy or too glib.

Familial love against the nationalist myth

Saints Peter and Fevronia of Murom: Russian patrons of familial love

The family represented the initial cell of human society. The holy history of the Old Testament shows that the state was not formed at once. The Old Testament people had no state before Joseph’s brothers went to Ægypt.

- Basis of the Social Concept, III.1

Christian patriotism may be expressed at the same time with regard to a nation as an ethnic community and as a community of its citizens. The Orthodox Christian is called to love his fatherland, which has a territorial dimension, and his brothers by blood who live everywhere in the world… At the same time, it is contrary to Orthodox ethics to divide nations into the best and the worst and to belittle any ethnic or civic nation. Even more contrary to Orthodoxy are the teachings which put the nation in the place of God or reduce faith to one of the aspects of national self-awareness.

- Basis of the Social Concept, II.3,4

It’s a worthy goal to resist nationalism in its current, explicitly post-Christian form, as the foregoing Christian thinkers in the linked Commonweal article have publicly done. However, to do this effectively, there needs to be a comprehensive, anthropological account of the separate human origins of the nation and of the state. When I say anthropological, I mean one that is accountable to the data regarding human society’s material origins. However, we should know well enough by now that, however much we Christian critics of voluntarism and nominalism may reject the is-ought distinction, mere insistence on facts does not have the persuasive power we need. Mere logos, issued forth by the babbling superego at the end of its tether, clearly no longer suffices. Mere pathos won’t do either, and nationalism is unanswerable on the sole basis of competing winged visions, competing ethea. My suspicion is that logos, pathos, ethos and mythos are all integrally necessary to posit a challenge to the siren call of nationalism. A comprehensive anthropological account of nation and state is therefore, by necessity, theological or at the very least mythological.

The fundamental organising principle of the society is the family, whether we consider that the band or tribe, or the nuclear family. The two forms have the same institutional function and material purpose. Of all human institutions the family, forged from the basic erotic urge and the desire to procreate, is more deeply rooted in our præ-history than any other social institution. Recorded history, on the other hand, gave us three subsidiary institutions: the nation, the state and the market—in that order.

Because state and market are the most ‘recent’ and the most rationalised of the subsidiary institutions, the case that the state precedes or undergirds the market is the easiest to make from a sæcular perspective. Karl Polanyi convincingly argues this case in The Great Transformation, using both œconomic and historical evidence: ‘that the modern market œconomy is a special, historically rooted form of social organisation. It is not a natural, universal system for organising societies, as its champions assert.’ Specifically, Polanyi demonstrates convincingly that market processes are wholly dependent on a juridical-institutional rationalism that can only derive from modern state structures. Because the libertarian / (anarcho-)capitalist political mythology is the most obviously false and most obviously anti-Christian, it’s also the easiest for consistent Christians (as well as sæcular conservatives, sæcular social-democrats and sæcular nationalists) to refute. The necessity of some kind of state control or state intervention in markets is thus indicated.

The gap between the nation and the state is less obvious, and it’s a tragœdy that this is a line that runs as a fault-line within Christendom (also within Islâm, Judaism and even Buddhism), and not just between sæcular and religious accounts of the human condition. I’ve made the argument before that Orthodox Christianity has better and more complete intellectual resources to draw on in distinguishing the nation from the state than the Western Christianities do – in part because of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine legacies of intentionally multi-national political projects. Unfortunately, we don’t use these resources because they have historically been at odds with the (in some cases understandable and just) desires of Orthodox peoples for political self-determination.

Here is where the invaluable witness of governance in post-colonial countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia, comes in. The naked artificiality of colonially-imposed Westphalian state structures and their inability to provide governance aligned to the common good provides the most obvious rebuke to those accounts of social reality which identify the nation with the state. An equal rebuke from the opposite direction involves the success story (however qualified by various social problems, later structural weakness and corruption) of the Qing Empire in building a convincingly multinational modern state. Each case seems to suggest that national belonging precedes efficacious state structures, and moreover that state structures need not map neatly onto tribal or cultural identities. These imperfect but compelling witnesses – furnished forth by the Byzantine state, the Yugoslav state, the Qing state, the Czechoslovak state, even the Russian state and also arguably the sæcular supra-national aspirations of pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism – alluringly suggest a broadly ‘Eastern’ answer to the challenge of the Westphalian order: an answer rooted in an autocratic understanding of the state*.

This leaves us with the third, most troublesome and most intellectually-hoary of our distinctions: that between the family and the nation. Here is where even the witness of scientific materialism and anthropology inevitably fades off into the mists of mythos and we are left with competing incommensurate comprehensive accounts of the good. Ironically, the further away we get into the præ-history of human sociality, the more closely the post-religious liberal / New Atheist (including the 1970s sex-positive post-feminist) mythology of human social origins looks suspiciously similar to the most virulently reactionary blood-and-soil alt-right nationalist mythology.

In both accounts, the family is a distinctly unnatural and unwelcome imposition on the basic reality of the primordial hunter-gatherer band. In the post-religious New Atheist-cum-third-wave feminist account, the family was a structure imposed concurrently with the rise of agrarian settlements, towns and cities. It superimposed itself upon the natural, healthy, primordial equality of men and women and the uninhibited protean sexual liberty which that equality is taken to presuppose. Along with the family came all the great host of social evils of civilisation: patriarchy; hero-worship; sexual division of labour; hoarding of agrarian wealth and so on. The nouvelle nouvelle-droite inversion of this mythology differs in only one respect: the assumption of a primordial equality. The right-wing mythology of human social origins also posits the hunter-gatherer band before the family. But instead of seeing the family as the origin of various inequalities, they see the family as the origin of various forms of effeminacy and weakening of the tribal spirit, the kin affiliation which they take to be the fundamental organising principle of human existence.

It is only when we begin to consider this new nationalism, not as a set of political principles but instead as a mythos rooted in the exaltation of primordial brutality, that we begin to truly comprehend its power and its seductive spiritual drive. It is a mythos, moreover, that is not founded independently of feminism, but precisely as an inversion of feminism predicated on the flight from feeling: a flip-side of the coin, as it were. In place of the Goddess myth which was erected precisely as a pseudo-anthropological attack on Christianity, we have another form of pagan mythologising happening on the same pattern: only priapic-totemic rather than yonic-totemic.

It therefore becomes clear that the problem, the contradiction, regarding nationalism lies at a deeper level than the superstructural problems of policy organisation of the state. They relate to the basic problem of the sexual division of labour. And the oppositional stances taken up by both the post-feminist and the nouvelle nouvelle-droite accounts of præhistory stem from the current relation between sex and œconomic life being profoundly sick and alienating. But we can’t simply pop these duelling mythologies back in the bag, so to speak. At the risk of sounding crypto-Sorelian rather than Marxist, they can be resolved only by appealing to a counter-mythology. Here I appeal to Scripture.

The Scriptural witness, which is not history but a vision of the Liturgical ordering of the cosmos, does however confirm a hierarchical ranking of præhistoric and early-historic human institutions. Of the four, only the family—however rooted it is in our fleshy desires and animal appetites—is prælapsarian. Sex and procreation between men and women is blessed by God as good, prior to the Fall, in the very first chapter of Genesis.

The nation (goy גוי), conceived of as the band or tribe, appears in Scripture only after the Flood in Genesis 10, and it appears on account of the drunken shame of Noah and the behaviour of his sons on beholding it. It is a postlapsarian development. Contrary to those who posit a racist theory of Scripture, this is not a curse only on Ham: it is Noah’s curse on all of his sons that they be thus divided from each other. Note that in the original Hebrew Noah does not bless Shem or Japheth, only God. The term also appears in the promise of God to Abraham, that he would become the father of many nations. But this promise is contingent on his obedience to God, which is lost when he enters Ægypt, and regained only after he proved himself willing to sacrifice Isaac.

The state and its structures – the idea of ‘rule’ or ‘dominion’ (mashal משל) applied in a coercive and legal sense – appears in Scripture only in concert with another sin: the betrayal of Joseph by his brothers into Ægyptian slavery in Genesis 37. It is noteworthy that in subsequent chapters Joseph himself is first a victim, and then a master, of the Ægyptian state! Notice how the ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’ promised by the state corrupts family ties (first Joseph’s brothers to him, and then Potiphar’s wife to her family) even as it legitimates itself by those ties and claims to extend them!

The very first instance of market relations in Scripture appears at the tail end of Genesis, and it appears only because Joseph is managing the affairs of the Ægyptian state: that is to say, he is regulating mercantile affairs. The term trade (karah כרה) appears only in Deuteronomy 2, in the desert concurrently with the Mosaic law, and at that only after (and because) the Hebrews were found worshipping the golden calf and desiring to go back into Ægypt after entering the wilderness. The implication in Deuteronomy is that Moses is issuing laws relating to buying and selling, only because the hearts of the Hebrews have been hardened against the Edomites, and they have fallen away from the early gift-œconomic relations of Abraham and Isaac with the Canaanites. Note well: the idea of regulating markets is issued by the lawgiver – the very icon in Scripture of the just state!! – directly in answer to the wayward and sinful Hebrews’ worship of golden idols!

See how Scripture precisely in its mythopœic account of the human – and the Hebrew – story thus categorically affirms the primacy of family before tribe; tribe before state; state before market. Each progression, each differentiation of social life into ever more complex, highly-determined and rational forms, represents a further falling away from the Edenic purpose of God for man. And yet, we are not called upon to retrogress atavistically: we cannot recreate Eden on our own power. Even after the appearance of Christ, the Mosaic law is still needful for us.

But the logic of familiality, even of erotic desire, is written into the very fabric of Creation and even our cosmology as Christians. We do not worship a priapic hero-god who slew a monstrous Tiamat and created the world from her corpse. We do not worship the stone idols of Willendorf and Dolní Věstonice. More to the point, though: we do not worship a disembodied monad, but instead a God who is in a more-than-metaphorical sense a Father with an Incarnate Son, with a very human Mother. Even though scientific facts are on our side (like the fact that a healthy man of any race and a healthy woman of any other race can naturally produce healthy, viable and fertile offspring), this is ultimately the only way to out-mythologise, to out-narrate, the new nationalism and its nouvelle nouvelle-droite intellectual underpinnings. We gain nothing by reverting to an insistence on the intermediary mythologies – and particularly not Hobbesian and Lockean ones of state and market – that have long since ceased to convince even the converted.

* A word of caution is in order here. When I use the term autocratic, I precisely do not mean what is now vulgarly called totalitarian or authoritarian-populist – a Weberian ideal posited in bad-faith opposition to the democratic or free or liberal rules-based world, with its roots in the broad Machiavellian-Montesquieuian-Gibbonite strain of Whig orientalism. For one thing, this dichotomy is not useful. Since 2003 I have been keenly sensitive to the fact that democracies are capable of – and now routinely do – behave in ways that Arendt would not hesitate to call totalitarian. This is one of the reasons why I still single out Christopher Hitchens, Liu Xiaobo and Václav Havel for particular censure: they were, when they lived, all advocates of democratic totalitarianism insofar as they enabled the wilful distortions of truth by the Bush Administration that led to over 600,000 wrongful deaths in Iraq, and the mainstream acceptability of rendition and torture. By this same token, the autocratic governments I mentioned above were not absolutist or totalitarian by Arendt’s understanding, for the simple reason that the heads of state were not laws unto themselves.

Orthodoxy and indigenous solidarity

Orthodox celebration in Aleut community in Nikol’skoe, Russia

I am not going to pass direct comment on the Covington Catholic / Nathan Philips story, for the simple reason that I wasn’t there and am not in a position to pass comment. However, I do feel strongly about the ‘framing’ of the story, and the artificial way in which pro-life and indigenous-rights concerns were opposed to each other, on the basis of one being traditionally a concern of the American ‘left’, and the other a concern of the American ‘right’.

I won’t belabour the theological and anthropological reasons for Orthodox Christians to take such a stand, but Orthodox Christians in the United States are, for understandable and (in my own opinion) correct reasons, drawn to the cause of the defence of the unborn. That is well and good. However, I believe we can likewise draw a strong moral and practical case for Orthodox Christians to embrace the cause of indigenous rights.

I am not simply speaking of the ample historical witness of great Orthodox holy men who witnessed among indigenous peoples and spoke up on behalf of their dignity whenever it was trampled: Saint Mark the Evangelist, Venerable Tryphon of Pechenga; Saint Herman the Wonderworker of Alaska; Patriarch Saint Tikhon of Moscow; Saint Jacob (Netsvetov); Archimandrite Andres (Girón) of blessed memory and Fr Themi (Adamopoulos) – though these witnesses are indeed important.

And I am not simply speaking of the general moral principles of justice within and between nations which hold that the only defensible war is a war of defence (and not a war of conquest), within the Church that peoples deserve a certain measure of collective identity outside of church and state, that cultural identity is not overridden by either religious or sæcular pretensions to a singular abstract universal truth – though, obviously, these are important too. Particularly when it comes to assessing questions of historiography.

At its best – or rather, when it holds to its own principles – Orthodox ecclesiology itself militates on behalf of indigenous peoples, for the simple reason that the Orthodox Church seeks to present the tactile and specific reality of the risen Christ to the people in a tongue that they can understand. Orthodoxy evades also the Protestant temptation to eradicate local customs – again, Orthodox missionaries seeking to redeem rather than erase and then superimpose foreign structures upon the cultures of the non-Christian peoples amongst whom they worked.

In addition, we must address the current realities. Orthodox Christianity, despite being the official religion of the Roman Empire for a significant length of time, nonetheless seems – at its best – to draw near to the crucified peoples of the world: the Arab Christians of Palestine and Syria, the Rusins – and historically, the Bulgarians and the Greeks. The plight of the Arab Christians in the Middle East is real: they face extinction at the hands of Sunnî fundamentalists and the revanchists of Turkey, Israel and Kurdistan. There is a very real affinity between the Orthodox historical witness and the current plight of the world’s indigenous peoples.

That plight is strikingly similar the world over. The Índios of Brazil, the Maya of Guatemala (many of them Orthodox) and Honduras – both face direct persecution and settler encroachment at the hands of right-wing governments. The indigenous inhabitants of the Congo have faced genocidal violence for over 20 years at the hands of neoliberal states after their mineral wealth. In East Asia, indigenous Taiwanese people face cultural discrimination and abridgement of their œconomic rights. The indigenous people of Okinawa are still fighting a battle against the American Marine base at Futenma, and for their land and water rights. And here in the United States, we have the indigenous resistance to the Tar Sands pipelines – first Standing Rock, and now Line 3 – and to the abuse and abduction of indigenous women.

Here’s the thing. Just as the plight of unborn children is not a ‘left’ issue or a ‘right’ issue, the plight of indigenous people is also not a ‘left’ issue or a ‘right’ issue; indeed it has some overlap with both. Indigenous values include traditional manhood, traditional womanhood, respect for the elderly and the sanctity and integrity of the child: all things which traditionalist conservatives can appreciate. On the other hand, indigenous worldviews also establish priorities for œcological and œconomic justice, promote reciprocality and generosity, and eschew acquisitive individualism: things which the socialist left can understand and admire. These are all, furthermore, concerns which the Orthodox Church also holds dear.